Sims 4: Trade-offs

The official Sims website has released a new blog post with more details about The Sims 4. I certainly like the look of the screenshot they provided (shown above). Here are just a few of the points they mentioned in the post.

The blog post talks about the design trade-offs that had to be made in order to create a new game:

So, rather than include toddlers, we chose to go deeper on the features that make Sims come alive: meaningful and often amusing emotions; more believable motion and interactions; more tools in Create A Sim, and more realistic (and sometimes weird!) Sim behavior. Instead of pools, we chose to develop key new features in Build Mode: direct manipulation, building a house room-by-room and being able to exchange your custom rooms easily, to make the immediate environment even more relatable and interactive for your Sim.

They also mentioned the improvements they’ve made to the realism of the games, including many new animations:

No more looking at the UI to figure out how your Sims are feeling – just look at their faces, posture, movements. That’s where you’ll see about 320 new emotion-based animations, as well as over 600 reactions to objects.

And we’ll finally be getting some actual gameplay footage soon:

We’ll be releasing over 15 minutes of in-game Live Mode footage (with complete UI) in the next two weeks.

Those are just a few of the highlights from the blog post. I have to say, I’m looking forward to the actual gameplay footage, to see what the UI looks like, and how the Sims act in ‘normal’ situations.

The official blog post has received quite a few negative responses, but I feel like there are some positive things on the horizon for the Sims franchise. Yes, The Sims 4 will be different from previous games, and yes, they’re excluding some features that people will miss. But we’ve been playing The Sims 3 for 5 years now; I think some change is definitely going to be a good thing. We already know that the Sims franchise is one built around expansion packs, stuff packs and other DLC, so I can’t say I’m too surprised that EA is building The Sims 4 base game with this in mind.